The present invention relates in general to Internet web page service providers and, in particular, to systems and methods for organizing search categories for use in an on-line search query engine based on geographic descriptions.
The use of the Internet as a communications medium has been met with overwhelming acceptance. A wide range of businesses have been spawned by the Internet, such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs). For end users, ISPs offer a portal onto the Internet for electronic mail (email) and World Wide Web (or simply xe2x80x9cwebxe2x80x9d) access. For businesses, ISPs provide proxy services, e-mail forwarding and web site content publication services.
In particular, the phenomenon of the web has been tremendously successful for commercial enterprises. The web provides a fast, convenient and relatively low cost means through web sites for reaching a wide audience for advertising and information dissemination. Creating a web site is simple: a business merely needs to compose content and post the content in a web site on the Internet.
Access to web pages over the Internet is typically accomplished via a web browser program operating through a user connection onto the Internet. Web browsers comprise the most popular form of accessing web sites and can be found in a variety of formats. A typical web browser includes provisions for navigating a web site through a graphical user interface used for both receiving search queries and presenting search query results.
A typical search query input by a user is processed by an on-line search engine which then accesses a database of web pages which are sent back to the user in the form of search categories presented as web page content. Search queries typically describe a person, place or thing to be found. Search categories typically describe a set of textual or graphical hyperlinks to be selected until the desired web content is found. On-line search engines which operate in this fashion are known as Yellow Page search directories which assist a user in locating a business. While Page search directories operate similarly, but assist a user in locating a person.
A problem arises when users attempt to process queries containing the geographic names, such as the names of cities or localities. People ordinarily think of cities and localities using descriptions which may not necessarily be recognized as an xe2x80x9cofficialxe2x80x9d name. For example, in the United States, the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Postal Service provide listings of cities, towns and localities using names by which they are officially recognized. Residents of those places, though, often use commonly known unofficial names or nicknames for describing a particular part of a city or town which may not be known to persons living outside that area. For example, Ballard, Washington is a local nickname for an area in northwestern Seattle. Similarly, users sometimes use ambiguous words or abbreviations cannot be searched using the official name only. For instance, Mount Vernon, Wash. might be specified in a search query to a search engine as Mount Vernon, Mt Vernon, or Mt. Vernon. Finally, abbreviations or pseudonyms might be used to specify a place, such as NYC instead of New York, N.Y.
Several prior art on-line web search engines attempt to resolve the ambiguities in geographic names. For example, the GTE Superpages.com, Zip2.com, Yahoo.com and Msn.com web sites provide some facilities for resolving geographic name description ambiguities but fail to provide a comprehensive solution providing for official names, unofficial names, local nicknames, abbreviations or initials.
A related prior art approach to resolving the ambiguities in geographic names involves the use of parsers used for string input processing. However, the use of parsers has not gained widespread acceptance for use in on-line search engines on the Internet, such as found with the Yellow Page and White Page directories, that is, online search directories used to identify businesses or persons. Moreover, such prior art parsers do not allow for interactive searches on-line over the Internet and have been used with fixed media, such as CD ROMs. And unlike the Internet, such searches are limited to a fixed input format and lack the capacity and dynamic search behavior found on the Internet.
Finally, a third prior art approach involves the use of telephone prefixes for resolving ambiguities of geographic names. The on-line search engine cross-references a telephone area code or prefix to a geographic name which identifies a city or locality. However, telephone prefixes are unreliable as they are often out of date and would therefore provide bad results. Moreover, telephone prefixes are not typically defined with a high degree of accuracy with respect to neighborhood boundaries and are less desirable for use in an on-line Yellow Pages or White Pages search directory.
Therefore, it would be useful to provide an approach to resolving ambiguities in a geographic name corresponding to an area of a city or town which could be used in a search query engine in an interactive, on-line search.
The present invention provides a system and method for organizing search categories for use in an on-line search query engine based on a geographic description. A city list is compiled into entries in a database organized by an official name for each city in the city list. A virtual city list is compiled into entries in a database organized by an unofficial name for each virtual city in the virtual city list. A friendly name list is compiled into entries in a database organized by a pseudonym for each friendly name in a friendly name list. A search query engine includes a user interface for receiving a location descriptor and for presenting the search categories organized by an actual location. The search query engine also includes a resolution module for resolving the actual location from the location descriptor using at least one of the official name in the city list, the unofficial name in the virtual city list, and the friendly name in the friendly name list.
Using a web browser, a user can thus enter a search query in the form of a geographic description and receive back search categories organized by an area of a town or city corresponding to that geographic description. This approach avoids the prior art limitations in the field by enabling the user to specify the official name of a geographic location. Alternatively, the user can specified an unofficial name which might be locally known or a pseudonym used as a nickname or xe2x80x9cfriendly namexe2x80x9d for the geographic location.